Historical
Fight for rights
Although many male chemists fought bitterly to prevent women joining their ranks
at the turn of the 20th century, some emerged as fervent supporters of the feminist
cause, as Marelene and Geoff Rayner-Canham find out
In short
REINHOLD THIELE / GETTY IMAGES
 It took a 40-year battle
before women chemists
were permitted to join
the Chemical Society in
1920
 At the turn of the 20th
century some men stuck
their necks out to fight
sexism and to put women
chemists on an equal
footing
 William Ramsay and
William Tilden led by
example, encouraging
women chemists to
join their research
groups and fighting for
their admission to the
Chemical Society
Female undergraduates
at Girton College,
Cambridge University,
were among the lucky
ones
56 | Chemistry World | March 2009
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KEYSTONE / CORBIS
her experiments in the laboratory at
the same time.
Harcourt was the first to raise
the issue of admission of women
to the Chemical Society. In 1880,
he proposed a motion that any
reference to men in the bye-laws
should also include women. Perhaps
unsurprisingly the motion was
rejected. But two young chemists,
William Ramsay and his long-time
friend William Tilden nobly carried
on the fight.
In 1888, Ramsay put forward a
similar motion to that of Harcourt’s.
Ramsay reluctantly withdrew the
motion after a lengthy discussion
when it became evident that it would
not be passed. But he had not given
up the fight.
In 1892, a female chemist,
probably Emily Lloyd – the first
woman associate member of
In the early 1900s
women could enter some
science fields; these
women were students at
a London hospital
Left to right: Augustus
Harcourt, William
Ramsay and William
Tilden all fought for
women chemists’ rights
the Royal Institute of Chemistry
(another founding society of
the RSC) – was put forward for
Fellowship of the Chemical Society.
Spurred by this event Ramsay moved
a motion, seconded by William
Tilden, that qualified women, in
general, be admitted. An amendment
was proposed that it was not
desirable to admit women at that
time. This amendment was defeated
by seven votes to six, then, bizarrely,
the motion itself was defeated, eight
votes to seven.
Following a petition in 1904 by 19
women chemists, a new motion for
admission failed once more. Tilden
was infuriated with the outcome and
expressed his displeasure in his 1905
address as president of the Chemical
Society:
‘The number of women desiring
admission is but small, and I fail to
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION CENTRE, ROYAL SOCIETY OF CHEMISTRY
British chemistry has not always
been hospitable to women. It took
a 40-year battle before women
chemists gained admission to the
Chemical Society, one of the RSC’s
founding societies, in 1920. The
Manchester University student
chemistry society managed
to bar women chemists from
membership until 1909. At Oxford
University, Dorothy Hodgkin was
thrown bodily out of a meeting
of the male-only senior Alembic
(chemistry) club, which did not
admit women chemists until 1950.
And in Edinburgh in 1870 it had
been a chemistry professor and his
(all male) students who instigated
the Surgeons’ Hall Riot to try to
prevent five women (including one
chemistry student) from writing
their examinations for medical
school.
But not all male chemists fought
against women joining their ranks.
Many played a strong supportive
role, sticking their necks out to fight
prejudice and further women’s role
in chemistry.
The earliest fervent pro-feminist
chemist was Vernon Augustus
Harcourt, Lee’s reader in chemistry
at Oxford, and father to eight
daughters and two sons. In 1879,
Harcourt was one of the founders
of the non-denominational Oxford
women’s college, Somerville.
At the time, women students
were segregated and had to find
professors who would repeat the
lectures that had already been
given to the male students. By
refusing to give separate lectures,
Harcourt forced the authorities
to permit mixed classes. He also
objected to having chaperones for
women students in the laboratory.
One woman, Mary Florence Rich,
attended his 1885 quantitative
analysis course, and Harcourt
avoided the need for a chaperone by
having W H Pendlebury’s research
student, Margaret Seward, perform
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Chemistry World | March 2009 | 57
Historical
HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION / CORBIS
HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
in 1881 when he was at the Yorkshire
College of Science (now the
University of Leeds), he published
research contributions with three
female students.
Meanwhile, Jocelyn Thorpe
followed in his (unrelated)
namesake’s pro-feminist footsteps.
Thus Jocelyn Thorpe and Whiteley
co-authored the third edition
of Thorpe’s dictionary of applied
chemistry. Jocelyn Thorpe was
way ahead of his time, reserving
(at Whiteley’s suggestion) two or
three places in his research group
specifically for women. One of those
to gain a reserved spot in 1921 was
the biochemist Helen Porter.
see any cogent reason, beside the
legal one, for excluding them. Some of
them are doing admirable scientific
work, and all the memorialists are
highly qualified. To deprive them
of such advantages as attach to the
Fellowship simply on the grounds
that they are not men seems to be an
unreasoning form of conservatism
inconsistent with the principles of a
Society which exists for the promotion
of science.’
In 1908, Tilden put forward
yet another motion, with Edward
Thorpe as seconder, but this too
failed. Ramsay was exasperated by
the never-ending obstructionist
tactics of the few, declaring: ‘‘‘Lord
what fools these mortals be’’ is the
truest thing that was ever said.’ It
was not until Parliament passed the
Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act
in 1919 that in 1920 the Chemical
Society finally admitted women.
Ramsey and Tilden both did
what they could to push forward
women chemists in their own
research groups. Ramsay had
supervised his first woman student,
Katherine Williams, when he had
been at Bristol College (later the
University of Bristol) in the 1880s.
After Ramsay moved to University
College London, Emily Aston – who
was to become the most prolifically
published woman chemist of the
late 19th century – was among the
women in his group.
Tilden invited Martha Whiteley,
one of the most renowned women
chemists of the early 20th century, to
join him as an assistant at the Royal
College of Science (later part of
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Imperial College). Whiteley went on
to become the first woman lecturer
in chemistry at a co-educational
university. She had helped prepare
the second edition of (Edward)
Thorpe’s dictionary of applied
chemistry. Interestingly, Thorpe,
as well as joining the fight to get
women admitted to the Chemical
Society, was possibly the first to take
on women chemistry students – back
Frederick Hopkins,
famous for his work on
vitamins, gave women an
equal role in his labs
Kathleen Lonsdale was
one of William Bragg’s
students
War-time heroes
Women chemists played an
especially important role during
the first world war, thanks in part
to two male professors. The first of
these was William Palmer Wynne,
head of chemistry at the University
of Sheffield. During the first world
war he recruited a team of female
chemistry graduates to produce
large quantities of local anæsthetics,
which were desperately needed
for the war effort. The second was
Kennedy Orton: all of the early
successful women chemists from
University College of North Wales,
Bangor (later the University of
Bangor) were Orton’s protegées.
Phyllis Violet McKie, the most
prominent woman chemical
researcher in the first world war,
worked with Orton.
In Britain, many women chemists
veered towards biochemistry for
their careers, joining organisations
such as the Lister Institute,
London, and the Rowett Institute in
Aberdeen. But it was the Cambridge
group under Frederick Gowland
Hopkins (1861–1947) that provided
a unique community of talented
women biochemists. As Mary Creese
commented in her 1991 paper in
the British Journal for the History of
Science:
‘At the time when there were
practically no women research
workers in any of the other university
departments at Cambridge, Hopkins
gave them places in his, despite the
criticism which this brought him.
Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when, as
a Nobel laureate with a world-wide
reputation he received hundreds
of applications for places in his
laboratory, nearly half of the posts
in his Department went to women
scientists.’
Among his students were Edith
Willcock, who contributed to the
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Several British male chemists promoted the
‘feminine cause’, but what was the situation
elsewhere? There were certainly male
chemists in other countries who supported
women students. The University of Zurich
was exceptional in its welcoming of women
students from the mid-1860s. In the latterpart of the 19th century, Zurich was one of
the few universities granting PhD degrees to
women. Among those who travelled to Zurich
for this purpose was American chemist Rachel
Holloway Lloyd, who worked with Victor
Merz between 1885 and 1887 on the hightemperature conversion of phenols to aromatic
amines; and British chemist Edith Humphrey,
who synthesised the first chiral octahedral
cobalt complex while working with Alfred
Werner from 1897 to 1901. Humphrey and
Lloyd were the first women of their respective
countries to obtain doctorates in chemistry.
In the US, Lafayette Mendel at Yale
University provided a mentoring role for
American women biochemists. From his
appointment in 1896 until his death in
1935, Mendel trained about 124 PhDs in
biochemistry, of whom 48 were women. The
women of Mendel’s group were particularly
tightly knit.
However, the battles for admission to
professional societies in Britain seem to have
been much more protracted than elsewhere
and the need for ‘white knights’ much more
crucial. It took a 40 years for women to be
accepted into the Chemical Society.
The earlier crusade to admit women to the
Royal Pharmaceutical Society (led by the
indefatigable Robert Hampson) had taken
from 1869 to 1879 before success. Yet in
CUSHING/WHITNEY MEDICAL HISTORICAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY, US
Was Britain unique?
In the US, Lafayette Mendel (second row, centre) trained many women biochemists
many other countries, women were admitted
to their national chemical societies earlier
and with less contest. For example, in the
US, a woman chemist, Rachel Littler Bodley,
had been among those who planned the
formation of the American Chemical Society
(although she resigned in protest following
the ACS Misogynists’ Dinner at the Boston
discovery of vitamins; the plant
biochemist Muriel Wheldale
Onslow; the leather chemist Dorothy
Jordan Lloyd; and the microbial
biochemist Marjory Stephenson.
Crystal-clear conscience
Crystallographer William Henry
Bragg (1862–1942) is often thought
to have been the first in his field to
take on women students – indeed
11 of his 18 students at the Royal
Institution were women; one of
these was Kathleen Lonsdale, after
whom the mineral lonsdaleite was
named.
In fact the story of women in this
field goes back much further, to
the mineralogist Henry Alexander
Miers who was elected to the chair
of mineralogy at Oxford in 1895. Two
women contributed to the work of
Miers’ crystallography group, one
of whom, Mary (Polly) Winearls
Porter, acted as a mentor for Dorothy
Hodgkin.
But it is J D Bernal (1901–1971)
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‘The men
that fought
for women
chemists’
rights should be
applauded’
meeting of 27 August 1880).
At the inaugural ACS meeting in 1876,
three women chemists were present,
including the renowned Ellen Richards from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Meanwhile the German Chemical Society
elected its first woman associate member, Elsa
Neumann, in 1901.
who probably deserves the greatest
recognition. Not only was the
crystallographer’s first research
student a woman, but throughout
his career he mentored several
pioneering women crystallographers,
including the ice crystal structure
specialist Helen Magaw, and the
first to solve a peptide structure,
Winifred Booth Wright. Hodgkin
was a member of Bernal’s group at
Cambridge from 1932 to 1934 and, in
the obituary that she wrote for him,
described the very pleasant working
atmosphere and rather convivial
lunches:
‘Every day, one of the group would
go and buy fresh bread from Fitzbillies
[which still exists], fruit and cheese
from the market, while another
made coffee on the gas ring in the
corner of the bench. One day there
was talk about anaerobic bacteria
on the bottom of a lake in Russia
and the origin of life, another, about
Romanesque architecture in French
villages, or Leonardo da Vinci’s
engines of war or about poetry or
printing. We never knew to what
enchanted land we would be taken
next.’
And it was Bernal, then at
Birkbeck College, London, who in
1953 provided a haven for Rosalind
Franklin after she could no longer
take the atmosphere at King’s
College, London.
It is unfortunate that most
biographies of chemists seem
to extol their contributions to
chemical science without detailing
the wider good that they may have
accomplished. The men that fought
for women chemists’ rights, a cause
that was not popular during their
eras, should be applauded. Today’s
women chemists, and society in
general, have a lot to thank them for.
Marelene and Geoff Rayner-Canham
are co-authors of Chemistry was
their life: pioneering British women
chemists, 1880–1949, 2008, Imperial
College Press (see p60)
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